Process Variables in SAIL form

why should it be a problem for process execution ? It is just a name. May you elaborate more on your use case scenario.

@sparshs My question is, should the SAIL form allow a "process variable"? As in pv!... inside a SAIL form.

@soumyab The SAIL forms with the process variable(s) fail to render at design time but renders successfully at runtime as long as the corresponding process variables are found in the context process. IMO, it isn't a standard way of coding the interfaces.

soumyab243: I think sikhivahans is right, it is not a good coding practice. If you want you change the existing interface and make it work in desired way.

I strongly suggest to not do this. It will make maintenance very ugly.

stefanh791: I agree it may be bit tedious but why are you strongly opposing it? Just want to know about this.

Hm ... my experience with with less-experienced Appian designers is that managing the levels of PV and AC and interface inputs already can be a challenge. Directly accessing PVs in a form just adds confusion to this. I prefer to have a clear way of handling data in process and forms. Going the default way (PV -> AC -> RI -> AC -> PV) is clear and easy to communicate and plain good style.

I agree. In addition you can test your forms with test data. It won't matter whether you were the one to develop it or not. For someone new to a big application with this implementation will be a huge difficulty.

To add on here - there have been times with PROD maintenance that might require accessing a PV directly from a SAIL form. For example, if you are maintaining an Appian instance that has been in PROD for a long time, there might be forms or expression rules that are called without named parameters (such as rule!testrule(pv!input1, pv!input2) rather than rule!testrule(input1: pv!input1, input2: pv!input2).

When this happens, adding extra inputs to the expression rule will break any process instances already in PROD, so you can use PV! directly on the SAIL form to access the variable. However, this is not a preferred method of doing it, and as @stefanh mentioned, becomes extremely tedious to maintain in the long-term. Especially for new development / applications not in PROD, the traditional inputs should be the only variables accessed on a form.

@stefanh I totally agree with you and even I am also trying to communicate that only. May be I did not convey that in my comment.